Prologue

When our beautiful daughter (we'll call her Princess or P) turned two, we decided that we were finally ready to start talking seriously about having another child. We had always planned on two children, but hadn't been ready to take the second plunge until now. We started talking about when we might be in a better position to afford daycare for Child #2 and after many discussions, decided that there would never be a good time. This was pretty much the same discussion we had leading up to Princess. Now that we could agree that we wanted to have another baby, I started thinking about what time of year would be best. Since Princess wasn't planned in such detail, I thought it might be nice to do a little more prep work. I decided that Spring would be a good time to have a baby. Fewer germs, you can't help but feel good in Spring, by Summer it would be able to go outside some and it would likely have some germ resistance built up by flu season and hopefully, we wouldn't be sleep deprived during winter blues season. It all sounded perfect to me. My husband (hereafter referred to as Hub) scoffed at my attempt to control the universe. I realized that yes, we may have difficulty conceiving on command, but I thought we might as well try to do it our way.

In order to get said Spring baby, we'd need to start trying in late summer. Too late for that this year and we kicked ourselves a little that we hadn't thought of it sooner. We figured this plan gave us six months to "live it up" so to speak. I'd drink as much Starbucks as I wanted and we'd splurge on a family vacation and then we'd come back and make a baby. Our late May vacation was fabulous and well-deserved. Our plan was to start trying for our new baby in late June. A few days after we got home, we kicked off a very busy season with our side business of photography. During the July 4th weekend, I was thinking that I really should have seen my period by now. They had been far from reliable lately, but I wondered....

We found ourselves in this situation a lot the past year. I'm a little late and we talk about it and get excited and Hub wants me to take a test NOW. I say that I don't want to waste a test (I actually don't want to be disappointed with a negative result), so let's just wait a few days. We go back and forth like this for a weekend and then I give in on Monday. (For some reason, all of our tests have been taken on Mondays.) It always amused me that even when we weren't actively "trying", we got excited at the prospect of possibly being pregnant.